U.S. Pat. No. 7,413,175, assigned to the assignee hereof, describes what can be generally called a “cover-driven workflow” for use in book manufacturing. In brief, in a large printshop environment, and especially an environment where books are printed on demand from digital data, book blocks (the set of printed pages) for any number of various titles have been matched to the covers of their respective titles. (As used herein, “title” shall refer to the instance of a book that a customer expects, e.g. “War and Peace” or “Gone with the Wind”—there may be made any number of copies of a given title.) Of course, any book block associated with a different title than the cover it is attached to is worthless, and must be avoided.
With cover-driven workflow, a certain number of unattached covers for a title are obtained corresponding to the number of copies desired for the title, and the covers themselves are digitally scanned and recognized as corresponding to the given title. The recognizing of each cover acts as a “trigger” to cause the image data for the corresponding title to be used to print a single book block, which is subsequently attached to the scanned cover. Because the cover itself of a title is used as a type of “job ticket” for causing printing of the book block for that title, cover-driven workflow can ensure that a cover is always attached to its correct book block.
US Patent Application Publications 2006/0028662 and 2006/0257232 teach comparable concepts in book manufacturing. U.S. Pat. No. 5,991,516 relates to reorganizing a digital print job to lessen a need to reconfigure the printing equipment.